One of the deepest lessons I received about giving and receiving was when someone broke into the Volkswagon campervan I was living in in Europe and stole a bunch of my stuff. I was parked on a street in Prague, not far from the main square, and close to one of the public showers. One day, when I came back from exploring the city, I found the door to my van unlocked and everything inside tossed about. Even my toothbrush was missing.
Maybe that was what did it. The missing toothbrush really shook me out of my shock and frustration. I thought of the man who had walked by my van the day prior looking in the windows at me. I hadn’t considered him much before, but now he had a suspicious face. No, now he had an innocent face. He was a guy who needed a toothbrush so bad that he’d steal somebody else’s.
While I walked to the police station to file a report, which I would need if I was to get any insurance money, I felt as light as air. It was that sense that one has when they have given a birthday present to someone happy to receive it. There’s an ecstasy in emptying one’s heart into another, not unlike the afterglow of a man giving into a woman.
While sitting in the waiting room at the police station, behind people certainly there with more important concerns than me, I found myself with a near infinite patience. I’d somehow never been so unhurried in my life, so happy to sit in a plastic chair in a cold and spiritless room.
It turned into a kind of contemplative meditation on giving and receiving. What I saw at that moment was that it was impossible for whoever entered my campervan to take anything from me. It was impossible because I’d decided to give them everything that they had taken with them. The moment I decide that I’m giving, there is no taking.
This is a good example of how the higher absorbs the lower, how love squelches fear, and how light casts out darkness.
Years later, gathered in a small circle in a riad in Marrakech, I was leading a conversation on creating and one of the women wasn’t seeing the possibility in this story, so I picked up a piece of fruit off the table and held it in my hand.
“Try to take this from me.”
Slowly and suspiciously, she reached over and took it from my hand. In the moment she grasped it, I moved my hand gently in her direction.
“Did you take it?” I asked.
“No, I tried, but you gave it to me.”
“OK, try again.”
She gave the fruit back and I held it again, this time closer to my body. She reached over quickly and snatched it. In the moment of her snatching, I loosened my grip, let the tension in my arm go and smiled while looking her in the eyes.
“Did you take it, this time?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I tried, but you let me have it again.”
“Do you see what I’m saying now?”
Her eyes were glazed over. It was sinking in. I added a few words to make it memorable.
“Nothing given can be taken.”
This became a cornerstone principle in my life and remembering it has liberated me from much toil and agitation, for within me I hold the power to never have anything taken from me simply through the choice I can make to give.
To wield the power of the choice to give doesn’t require that it happen in advance of the action of taking. It can occur in the moment of the attempt when the person is snatching the fruit from your hand, or even afterwards, when you discover the toothbrush is missing.
In fact, the light of giving can cast out the darkness of taking even years later.
Some years ago, a small men’s group that I’m a part of recommended that I write a letter to my father thanking him for everything he had ever done for me. This was to be a practice that would help heal the subconscious judgments I held of him. In writing that letter, I found myself moving from the obvious things to be grateful for – the trips to Disneyworld, helping me make my pinewood derby racecar in cub scouts, and coming to all my sports games, to the less obvious like grounding me for being an asshole and finally even for divorcing my mother.
That last one snuck up on me.
I didn’t want to write it, because even then in my early thirties, I was still pissed at him for that. A part of me still felt the way I did when I was fifteen years old, sitting in our living room, having just been mysteriously called in from playing outside earlier than dinner time so that our parents could ‘talk to us about something important’. Serious talks weren’t exactly something that happened in our house. There was a lot of sarcasm and talking about things, but we never even had the ‘birds and the bees’ conversation. Maybe that’s what this was going to be, I thought.
My Dad spoke.
“Your mother and I are getting a divorce.”
It was short and straight to the point. No beating around the bush. That’s the way my Dad shoots.
I remember looking immediately over at my mother and seeing her arms folded with a look of dissatisfaction on her face. It wasn’t the kind of sadness for letting us down, but the kind of being let down herself. That stuck with me and I carried it for years.
It wasn’t the whole story for me. At the same time, it was great for my Mom to find herself, I could see that. She’d gotten married so young. And eventually, she came to be happy it worked out the way it did.
We can become happy with anything I suppose.
I’ve got friends who can’t walk and who are happy. My 4th grade teacher was missing his middle finger, and he was happy as a pig in shit. Even back then, I doubted his story that it got cut off in a machine. The middle finger seems more likely to be one that’s chopped off by the wrong person you pointed it at to be caught in a machine, but maybe that’s just my wild imagination.
When I wrote that line though, when I thanked my father for leaving my mother, which came in on its own from the wellspring of love I had tapped by listing one thing after another that I was thankful for, suddenly all those years of being taken from just vanished. It was as if I’d just realized that my toothbrush was missing, saw how much that person needed it more than me, and moved my hand in their direction. The pain of having my childhood vision of our family taken from me was gone.
I can still remember the whole thing and all the years of hurt, but the hurt itself was gone. Nothing given can be taken.
This is what we mean when we talk about forgiving. In a literal and etymological sense, to for-give is simply ‘to give completely’. Nothing given completely can be taken, be it something happening now or anytime in the past or future.
If a long time ago, something was taken from you and bringing it to mind still hurts or bothers you in some way, then you can be free of this by simply choosing to give away that which was taken. Maybe it was money, pride, your virginity, or a loved one. It doesn’t matter what it was and it doesn’t matter how true or accurate it is to say that it was taken from you. If it feels like it was taken, then it was taken. And you can be free by choosing to give that thing away.
Forgiving doesn’t need to be about letting someone off the hook, not holding people accountable or even pretending that a wrong wasn’t tried against you. It can simply be about creating freedom through the choice to give completely.
By giving completely that which was taken from us we create real, pervasive freedom that changes the way we experience ourselves and the world.
When we become this free, it’s hard to remember what it was like before. The free-rolling wheel doesn’t remember being attached to the axle. It’s off on a new adventure looking only forward.
That’s why this idea became so central in my life and work. Freedom isn’t just about relief. It’s about liberating full-throttled creation. When a person lets go of something that was holding them back, they are free to look and move forward towards that which they desire.
I’ve used it to help so many people get what they want. Money, relationships, and all sorts of dream lives that didn’t seem possible before. This is because giving has even more power than I’ve shared so far. Giving is literally the antidote to fear.
Loving us all, JPM
